Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting

Wednesday, October 30th, 1996 - Drexel University

"Pegasus" Machines On the March

A handful of articles in the computer trade press maintain that at Fall Comdex this month as many as six companies will be showing early versions of their latest handheld computers which will utilize the new MS Windows CE (aka Pegasus) operating system. This group includes NEC, HP, Casio, and Compaq. In a recent conversation with Educalc's Richard Nelson, he said that a PC-card developer who attended the last HP local users' group meeting in Southern California brought along with him an early NEC Pegasus palmtop. This unit was slightly deeper and longer than the HP200LX, with slightly larger LCD/touchscreen and stylus, clamshell case with QWERTY keyboard, serial and two-way IR ports, sincle PCMCIA type-II card port and approximately 3.5 meg of ROM applications built in. Battery power was supplied by two AA-size alkalines.

Richard also mentioned that HP allegedly had as many as two hundred engineers in Singapore working on their version of this palmtop. It seems that for HP, a new line will be started, to complement the Omnigo, LX and calculator products. Stay tuned for any additional details as they emerge from the Las Vegas show floor. It will be interesting to see how the various companies' versions of this machine are able to differentiate themselves from each other, either in features, performance or price.

HP Handheld Conference Videotape is Now Available

I have finally completed the editing process for the 17 hours and 20 minutes of activities from HHC '96, which was held in Anaheim, California back in late August. Twenty four presentations were captured on tape. Although it's an amateur video job, it's not half bad. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of the videos, feel free to contact me at 856-751-1310 at home or 856-722-3795 at work, or at jake-s@water.waterw.com on email.

Omnigo Price Decrease

Hot on the heels of the introduction of the $399. Omnigo 120 organizer (which betters the model 100 by adding Pocket Quicken in ROM along with flash RAM card support and an easier-to-read LCD), HP has officially dropped the price of the original Omnigo 100 by $100. to $249. This will keep it well in the running with Sharp and Casio products. Interestingly, it is Hewlett-Packard's intention to only offer the newer '120 in North America, since the price was deemed too high to gather any popularity elsewhere. This is as opposed to the worldwide availability of the 200LX pocket PC, which costs twice as much, but offers many more generic DOS-based capabilities and is aimed at a more professional market.

EduCalc's Second-Generation WWW Site and Catalog

If you're on the Web, check out EduCalc's new site at www.educalc.com. It's much better organized and contains an enormous amount of information about products and how to order them. In addition, many of their technical notes are now readable on line. Also, their quarterly catalog production just got a shot in the arm with the acquisition of one of the new Polaroid digital color cameras with a 1200 by 1600 resolution. The newest catalog (#73) was done entirely electronically in house, with Educalc folks shooting the color photos and incorporating them into the text by computer. Although this catalog is the test for their new publishing method and it is only half the size of their typical catalog, it required 1.3 gigabytes of space. They delivered it to their printer on thirteen 100-meg ZIP cartridges.

A CD-ROM Library of HP38/48 Goodies

Recently, an announcement came over the Internet about a new CD-ROM disk done exclusively for HP calculator files, programs and documentation. This disk contains 314 megabytes in over thirteen thousand files, covering just about every scientific, business and leisure application. Also included is technical hardware information, the Horn Goodies disks, program collections from many users groups around the world and lots of technical postings from Usenet news over the past ten years. All this can be yours for $55. Plus ten dollars shipping from the manufacturer. For more information, send email to carles@idgrup.ibernet.com and ask about the "Handheld HP CD_ROM Library".